Video: Intercultural Communication: Definition, Model & Strategies

Communication is a pretty important part of daily life, but what do you do when you need to communicate with someone from another culture? Explore the ideas behind intercultural communication and test your understanding with a brief quiz.

Chris has a master's degree in history and teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.

Communication is a pretty important part of daily life, but what do you do when you need to communicate with someone from another culture? Explore the ideas behind intercultural communication and test your understanding with a brief quiz.

Cultures and Communication

Buongiorno. Salam. Nín hao. Hujambo. Howdy. There are so many ways just to say hello!

No matter where you are in the world, communication is important. But communicating across cultures can be pretty hard. And I don't just mean that there's a language barrier, although that can be an issue. No, I mean that cultures actually have some very different ways of communicating. Some cultures are informal, some cultures use a whole series of ritual greetings before having a conversation, some cultures consider it rude to show up to a meeting on time.

But what do all these cultures have in common? Well, for one, you can offend each of them if you don't understand their communication practices. And we want to avoid that. So what do we do? Well, to put it simply, we learn to communicate!

Intercultural Communication

So, we need to learn how to communicate all over again, just like when we were children. And just like when we were children, this requires learning language as well as learning behavioral norms for good communication. However, this will be a bit different since we're adults learning how to communicate in someone else's culture, not our own.

Intercultural communication is the verbal and nonverbal interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds. Basically, 'inter-' is a prefix that means 'between' and cultural means… well, from a culture, so intercultural communication is the communication between cultures. Sometimes, this is used to describe a single person trying to interact in a foreign environment but more often, it is a two-way street, where people from both cultures are trying to improve their communication.

Now, if you want to learn about intercultural communication, it's important to understand what this is. But it's also important to understand what it isn't. Intercultural communication is targeted at allowing for positive and productive interaction. You are not joining this culture, you are not becoming a member of another society, you are not abandoning your own culture. That would be assimilation and that's not what we're after.

Intercultural communication is also not simply a language proficiency. Yes, communication requires the ability to understand language, but just think about how much of your communication with even your own friends is nonverbal: our body language, our attitudes, the rituals from hand-shaking to the stink eye. Some researchers estimate that up to 93% of all human communication is nonverbal, although according to recent studies, it's actually closer to 60%.

Still, that means that more than half of communication is never spoken. So, intercultural communication is going to take a lot more than just learning a language.

Developing Communication

Intercultural communication is generally explained through three parts. They overlap a bit with each other but together, give you the tools to communicate with people from another culture. Ready to give them a try?

The first is knowledge, or an understanding of communication rules within a culture. This is just the practical stuff you need to know to communicate, things like language but also greeting rituals, styles of communication, that sort of stuff. Do people of this culture prefer to talk business in morning or night? Are they generally formal or informal? It's best to try and develop as much knowledge about a culture before going off and trying to master the other two parts of intercultural communication.

And that brings us to part two: skills. Knowledge is one thing, but putting that knowledge into practice is another. Learn to speak with people of that culture, learn to listen, learn where to put your hands when someone else is talking. What is best said verbally and what is best communicated through body language? Developing the skills to communicate can take a lot of time and you have to practice by actually interacting with people, so it can be intimidating.

Finally, there's part three: attitudes. And this actually means two different things. For one, it means your own attitude about communication. To master intercultural communication, you absolutely must have an attitude of cultural tolerance. If you're trying to go into this with the belief that your culture is inherently better than everyone's and that their cultural idiosyncrasies are stupid, well, you can probably guess what you'll end up communicating.

The other side of this is empathizing with local attitudes. Some cultures don't like government interference, some cultures don't trust outsiders, some cultures only like to talk about business after the third course of dinner. Appreciating these attitudes is an important part of learning how to interact within that culture. But if you can handle these three parts of intercultural communication, then a whole world opens up. Or at least, one culture does.

Lesson Summary

Intercultural communication is the verbal and nonverbal interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds. In other words, it's the process of communicating with people from another culture. Intercultural communication is about much more than just language, since so much of communication is nonverbal. In general, there are three parts to it.

Knowledge of a culture gives you the basic understanding of communication within a culture, skills are the ability to put knowledge to use, and attitudes means both your own cultural sensitivity and an empathy for cultural beliefs, opinions, and customs. These are the three basic components of intercultural communication.

Thank you for listening and farewell. Arrivederci. Auf wiedersehen. Adios.

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